Labiodentals: lips and teeth

In hopes of getting me able to pass the DALF, we’ve been looking at verbs whose infinitive ends with IR. We’ve looked at regular IR verbs, like finir.
We’ve looked at irregular verbs like courir, dormir, partir, sentir, and sortir:

finir

courir

dormir

partir

sortir

je

finis

cours

dors

pars

sors

tu

finis

cours

dors

pars

sors

on

finit

court

dort

part

sort

nous

finissons

courons

dormons

partons

sors

vous

finissez

courez

dormez

partez

sortez

ils/elles

finissent

courent

dorment

partent

sortent

Now let’s look at yet another set of irregular IR verbs. This time, we’re going to figure out a way to remember which verbs belong to this class:

ouvrir

couvrir

offrir

souffrir

je

ouvre

couvre

offre

souffre

tu

ouvres

couvres

offres

souffres

on

ouvre

couvre

offre

souffre

nous

ouvrons

couvrons

offrons

souffrons

vous

ouvrez

couvrez

offrez

souffrez

ils/elles

ouvrent

couvrent

offrent

souffrent

First, what’s unusual about this class? It’s the endings–they are the same as for ER verbs, which the IR verb endings usually differ from quite a bit.

Now, how can we remember these? It turns out that finding patterns in this kind of data is what linguists do all day. Here, the pattern appears to be related to the consonantal structure of the verb roots. To understand what’s going on, you need to know a few things about the sounds of language.

To simplify quite a bit: speech sounds are produced by making air leave the lungs through the mouth. Look in the mirror while you make the sound ah. Close your mouth and try to make the sound ah. Doesn’t work.

Consonants are made by obstructing the flow of air through the mouth. Look in the mirror while you say bah-bah-bah. See how the flow of air is obstructed completely when you make the sound that we represent with the letter b?

Different consonants are made by obstructing the flow of air at different places. Look in the mirror while you make the sounds bah and kah. Does your mouth look the same, or different?

Now that you have some of the basics of how consonants work, let’s look at the sounds in the roots of these verbs. You notice that (1) there is a cluster of consonants (i.e., more than one); the second consonant is r; and the first consonant is one of f or v. Look in the mirror while you make the sounds fah and vah. You’ll notice that the obstruction for these consonants is made with the lips and teeth. (We’ll talk about how you differ between the f and the v some other time.) Consonants that are produced with an obstruction made by the lips and teeth (actually, just one lip) are called labiodental consonants, or labiodentals.

It turns out that French has exactly two labiodentals: the sound that we usually spell with the letter f, and the sound that we usually spell with the letter v. (In the languages of the world, there are two other labiodental consonants. We don’t have a way to spell them in English, but you probably have one of them–the labiodental nasal–in the English word emphasis.) So, we can say that you see this particular pattern of verb endings when a verb has a consonant cluster in the middle, the first consonant is a labiodental, and the second consonant is r.

I know of three verbs that don’t have the labiodental-r root but that do have this pattern in the present indicative. However, they behave differently from the others with respect to their past participles. Those verbs are cueillir (to pick, to gather), acceuillir (to receive, to greet), and recueillir (to collect, to gather). The present indicative is like the labiodental-r verbs that we’ve seen.

However, the past participle of these verbs is different from the labiodental-r verbs: couvert versus ceuilli. There are also a couple of verbs that have -aillir in the stem that have the same present tense pattern, maybe–one of my Bescherelles has a note about how even famous writers sometimes don’t follow this pattern for those verbs.

So, with a little bit of linguistics, you don’t have to memorize the fact that it’s verbs with fr and vr in the root that have this conjugation–all you have to do is remember that it’s verbs with a consonant cluster in the root where the first consonant in the cluster is a labiodental. Fun, huh?

Yeah, it’s a shame that it’s hard to use this kind of stuff in foreign language teaching. I took a bazillion Language X 101 classes over the course of my education; you see people in those classes struggling to memorize patterns like “it’s always v except in front of p, b, and m, when it’s u,” when there’s a pretty straightforward pattern, in linguistic terms. (That’s the pattern for the word “and” in Hebrew. It’s “v” in front of everything but bilabial consonants, i.e. p, b, and m.) This kind of thing is ubiquitous in the languages of the world.